‘She’s straight enough now, I suppose,’ this lady said.
‘She goes down. But she gives people a good deal of latitude for speculation.’
‘Who is this?’ asked Madeline. ‘I ask for information, to keep out of her way. I find I am developing the most shocking curiosity. I must be in a position to check it.’
The ladies exchanged hardly perceptible glances. Then Mrs. Gammidge said, ‘Mrs. Innes,’ and looked as if, for the moment, at any rate, she would withhold further judgment.
‘But you mustn’t avoid the poor lady,’ put in Mrs. Mickie, ‘simply because of her past. It wouldn’t be fair. Besides--’
‘Her past?’ Madeline made one little effort to look indifferent, and then let the question leap up in her.
‘My dear,’ said Mrs. Gammidge, with brief impatience, ‘he married her in Cairo, and she was--dancing there. Case of chivalry, I believe, though there are different versions. Awful row in the regiment--he had to take a year’s leave. Then he succeeded to the command, and the Twenty-third were ordered out here. She came with him to Lucknow--and made slaves of every one of them. They’ll swear to you now that she was staying at Shepheard’s with an invalid mother when he met her. And now she’s accepted like everybody else; and that’s all there is about it.’
‘There’s nothing in that,’ said Madeline, determinedly, ‘to prove that she wasn’t--respectable.’
‘N--no. Of course not,’ and again the eye of Mrs. Gammidge met that of Mrs. Mickie.
‘Though, you see love,’ added the latter lady, ‘it would have been nicer for his people--they’ve never spoken to him since--if she had been making her living otherwise in Cairo.’
‘As a barmaid, for instance,’ said Madeline, sarcastically.
‘As a barmaid, for instance,’ repeated Mrs. Gammidge, calmly.
‘But Simla isn’t related to him--Simla doesn’t care!’ Mrs. Mickie exclaimed. ‘Everybody will be as polite as possible when she turns up. You’ll see. You knew, didn’t you, that she was coming out in the Caledonia?’
‘No,’ said Madeline. She looked carefully where she was going to put her coffee-cup, and then she glanced out again at the laburnum hanging over the plains. ‘I--I am glad to hear it. These separations you take so lightly out here are miserable, tragic.’
The other ladies did not exchange glances this time. Miss Anderson’s change of tone was too marked for comment which she might have detected.